Beginner-Friendly Firearm Training Tips for Women 

Firearm training is a fairly gender-neutral activity. Guns have been called the Great Equalizers for good reasons! However, as my experience with training hundreds of people has revealed, some training approaches can be effectively modified to make them work better for one gender or the other.  

Firearm Training Gender Difference 

Overall, men and women experience firearms training similarly. The small differences stem either from size and strength differences between average men and average women, or from factors I cannot attribute but have observed regularly. 

Women are, on average, smaller and have weaker arms than men. That makes adjustable-length stocks even more useful for them than for men. It also presents a dilemma in making recoil management more comfortable: the usual expedient of compensating for reduced grip strength with heavier handguns runs into increased fatigue from holding up the guns. A similar problem comes with heavy triggers: men with large hands can get more leverage on a trigger by putting the finger further into the trigger guard, while a woman with small hands can only reach with a fingertip, reducing her ability to press the trigger cleanly. Perhaps the most focused and successful effort to rectify this problem was designed by Walther with the input of the most eminent female trainers and sports shooters: PDP-F 9mm pistol, with trigger position and grip form optimized for typical female hands. The firearm is almost identical to the baseline PDP model in performance and overall dimensions, but far superior in ergonomics for shooters with smaller hands. In general, fitting the firearm to the person has been far more important with female shooters: men performed fairly similarly with guns of similar size and power, while beginner female shooters showed drastically better results with just one model (CZ75SA, P7PSP, PD10, Jericho 941F, M1911) than with other, even broadly similar models. As their training progressed, their ability to use various models effectively improved greatly. 

Cross Eye Dominance 

Women and girls have cross-eye dominance at twice the rate of men and boys, making unmagnified optical sights a great help in learning to use long guns from the dominant hand side. In training preschoolers, I also noticed a very strong preference by girls for open sights as opposed to peeps or ghost rings. That preference evens out by about age 10. Both genders have roughly equal responses to safety training, but women have much less tendency to engage in horseplay with guns. 

Women also show a significantly better aptitude for fine motion control, such as rifle trigger manipulation. It’s telling that men, when first grasping a pistol-gripped rifle, put the thumb around the grip for recoil control, while women almost always put the thumb on the same side as the fingers in a typical precision shooting hold. Again, it’s not surprising that women place and win in shooting competitions out of proportion to their participation numbers. 

Anticipating The Recoil 

The problem area, especially with handguns, is the flinch. Doubling up on hearing protection, using sound-suppressed rimfire trainer pistols or even air guns, moving the practice to outdoor ranges with no sound-reflecting surfaces nearby all help. Flinching affects both genders, but I’ve seen it more with women. 

Maintenance and Disassembly  

When it comes to disassembly, maintenance, and reassembly, there’s a tendency to avoid learning. Too many women at large have been socialized away from working with mechanisms even on the basic field stripping level. Fortunately, the next generation of gunsmiths and armorers is far more balanced, and I am seeing younger hunters take a greater interest in the workings of their guns and optical or electronic sights.

Conclusion 

Since the training I provide is defense-oriented, I see a significant difference in attitudes towards the use of force. As a rule, men are overly enthusiastic about shooting goblins, while women tend to be very timid about using force even when well within their legal rights. And, equally stereotypically, that difference goes away when discussing the defense of dependents. “And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail, the female of the species must be deadlier than the male” (Kipling). 

While my observations are based on the typical, I must also note that motivated individuals stand well outside of the average performance for either gender. In sports shooting, women hold enough records to show that training and practice erase the impact of the physical and acculturation differences.  

 A couple of quotes from female shooters illustrate this:

• (Petite Chinese woman living in Switzerland) “My favorite gun…that would depend on the purpose. 404 Lott and 375 H&H for African game, and CZ75 for upright walking monkeys.” 

• (Memphis funeral home director, later a Navy corpsman, at a photoshoot) “I didn’t bring any of my own guns as props…other than the two I am now carrying.” 

• (Petite young mother from Nashville, talking about her home defense shotgun) “Sure, 10 gauge does kick a little, but it’s not like I shoot it much…10-15 shells at a range trip, at most.” 

Written by: Oleg Volk, Firearms Photographer